Open Source for the Federal Government
Although the Federal Government is historically slow to adopt open source software, the combination of RHS (or Spacewalk) with verifiable, scanned, and digitally-signed Docker images can literally turn the tide.
The collapsing, or consolidation, of data centers throughout DoD can only be reasonably accomplished by refactoring legacy or monolithic applications. That refactoring can include Docker container-based microservices and Dockerized and OpenShifterized applications.
Responses
While I've seen a steady increase in the adoption of open source software, I haven't seen a broad shift to containerized deployments. In my experience, the public sector (and DoD in particular) is still focused on the consolidation of physical assets and the migration of existing services to virtual data centers. Once that's out of the way, I imagine that we'll see more of the deployments that you're alluding to.
DoD and related entities have particular problems with shared-kernel architectures due to the compartmented nature of many of their workloads. While you might see adoption of containers to facilitate modular scaling and upgrades of service components, you're likely to see such services grouped onto dedicated container-hosts. Gotta figure that, once they start going down that path, DoD will be wanting orchestrator of orchestrators type solutions to manage multiple Docker clusters via a single-pane-of-glass.
Overall, where opensource seems to be blossoming is in development toolchains and CI/CD.
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